Conclusion

In Frederic Reynolds and Sir Henry Rowley Bishop's Comedy of Errors, a challenge to hegemonic gender roles within marriage arises from the conjunction of one scene in which a song usually sung by a man is revoiced for a female character, and a later scene in which the scenic effects relate to the lyrics of the earlier scene's song. Play On! 'ghosts' its on-stage characters with a set of historical figures and William Shakespearean characters that disrupt a sense of stable identity. All Shook Up plays with its own status as an adaptation, while the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's Romeo & Juliet unleashes a barrage of allusions to other works, personalities and cultural references, sometimes simultaneously. As Romeo & Juliet demonstrates, the jukebox musical's potential to destabilise identities can also suggest some of the fluctuating effects of earlier performance traditions in which the gender of the performer did not match the gender of the character performed.